CWHR History

Info

CWHR moved to beautiful Southern Village, a mile south of campus, in 2009.

The North Carolina Program for Women’s Health Research was founded in 2000 under the auspices of the UNC Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology. The previous director, Dr. Katherine Hartmann, and a small staff established the program in its former location at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

As we grew in size, a decision was reached to officially change CWHR from a departmental program to a center within the UNC School of Medicine. The name was changed in 2004 to The Center for Women’s Health Research at UNC, also referred to as CWHR.

In November, 2008, Dr. Wendy Brewster began as the new director and in February, 2009, CWHR moved to its present offices in Southern Village. A new vision and mission was crafted, focusing on increasing research collaborations, enhancing existing research efforts in all areas of women’s health and wellness, identifying new areas for research, and strengthening the measurement of long term improvement of the health of the women of North Carolina.

The Center has been involved with more than 240 proposals to organizations such as the National Institutes of health (NIH), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies, private foundations, and multiple pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials. Today, an average grant submitted to one of the institutes of the NIH has less than a 15% chance of being funded; the average funding rate on proposals with which we have been involved has been approximately 35% overall.

For the past ten years we have produced and distributed the NC Women’s Health Report Card biennially; it has been an in-depth review of the health status of North Carolina’s women using a five-year rolling window for comparison. In 2011 we shifted to tracking ten-year trends in the major areas of research focus for the Center, more clearly trying the report card into the research agenda we are developing.